The great Chicago planner Daniel Burnham spoke of the power of a “noble, logical diagram.” Once recorded, he said, it “will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing ...

Josh Lewandowski, Minnesota-based architect and founder of furniture design firm Nordeast Industries, is on a mission to create beautifully complex, yet utterly meaningless architectural diagrams.

Venn used the diagrams to prove a form of logical statement known as a categorical syllogism. This can be used to model reasoning. Here’s an example: “All computers need power.